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Power Platform Community / Blogs / Power Apps - Community Blog / Hierarchy Security

Hierarchy Security

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Introduction

Imagine you’re managing a growing enterprise with multiple departments, team leads, and executives—each requiring different levels of access to business-critical data. You want to ensure that users see only the information relevant to their roles while maintaining an efficient collaboration structure. This is where Hierarchy Security in Dataverse becomes a game-changer.

The Story: A Growing Organization's Challenge

At Contoso Solutions, a global consulting firm, data security became a growing concern. The leadership team noticed that junior employees had access to sensitive client details, while senior managers struggled to get a holistic view of their teams’ work. IT needed a scalable security model—one that wasn’t just role-based but also reflected organizational hierarchy.

Enter Hierarchy Security in Dataverse—a feature designed to grant access based on an organization’s reporting structure, ensuring that managers can oversee data relevant to their teams without exposing unnecessary details to lower-level users.

What is Hierarchy Security in Dataverse?

Hierarchy Security allows organizations to control access dynamically based on the managerial or positional structure. Unlike traditional role-based security, which assigns access permissions statically, hierarchy security ensures that higher-level users inherit access to data owned by their subordinates—without requiring direct role changes.

Dataverse provides two types of hierarchy security models:

  • Manager Hierarchy – Uses the Manager field from Azure Active Directory (AAD) to determine data visibility.
  • Position Hierarchy – Uses a custom position-based structure where users at a higher position can see records owned by their subordinates.

How Contoso Implemented Hierarchy Security

To solve their data access issue, Contoso implemented the Manager Hierarchy model. This ensured that:

✅ Managers could access their team’s records without additional role assignments. 

✅ Junior employees saw only the data they owned. 

✅ Executives retained a broad, organization-wide view while respecting department-level confidentiality.

For more control, they also fine-tuned Position Hierarchy, ensuring that department heads had oversight without interfering with peer divisions.


Key Benefits of Hierarchy Security

🔹 Improved Data Governance – Ensures data access aligns with corporate structures.
🔹 Reduced Administrative Overhead – Eliminates the need to manually assign multiple roles.
🔹 Scalability & Flexibility – Supports complex organizational structures efficiently.

Best Practices for Implementation

  1. Define Clear Organizational Roles – Ensure that the hierarchy in AAD or Dataverse mirrors real-world structures.
  2. Use a Hybrid Approach – Combine role-based and hierarchy security for better flexibility.
  3. Regularly Audit Data Access – Review security logs to prevent unintended access.
  4. Test Before Deployment – Validate access levels in a sandbox environment before rolling out changes.

Conclusion

Hierarchy Security in Dataverse is a powerful yet underutilized tool that enables organizations to enforce data access efficiently. Whether you're working with corporate leadership, project teams, or customer-facing departments, implementing a structured hierarchy security model ensures the right people have the right access—nothing more, nothing less.

How does your organization manage data access?

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